


Trouble's A Mangy Stray Dog (Play With It Once And It Follows You Home)

by ThisMessIsAPlace (McFearo)



Series: Son Of A Gun [1]
Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Courier Ezra Walker, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Others characters implied/mentioned, mentions of child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-06 03:12:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11591730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McFearo/pseuds/ThisMessIsAPlace
Summary: "I'm familiar with your kind," Vulpes admits at length, and there's a private joke in there. "Like a loyal dog -- a favorite tool of mine, do you know?""Dogs? Or couriers?"The man does chuckle then, and that is the only answer Ezra will get.





	Trouble's A Mangy Stray Dog (Play With It Once And It Follows You Home)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Warsaw Or The First Breath You Take" by Them Crooked Vultures.

When they met new folk and Ezra's mother described him and his siblings, of him she always said he were a gentle boy. "Wild as a desert rain," she said, "but jus' as soft."

  
He ran the cliffs barefoot and slept in the fields under stars in the summer months, but he had a level head and a soft heart. He didn't cause trouble, and he never fought.

  
He loomed head and shoulders over other boys his age, made grown men look up to address him. It were Madeline's favorite pastime, to watch boys twice as tough and half as big skitter away at the sight of tall Ezra Walker striding over to investigate the noise. Because she knew the truth of it, that he were soft as the earth after rain.

  
Then a man from the city come and planted two bullets in him, and from them a bitter nettle grew.

 

* * *

 

There's something that nibbles at the corners of his thoughts, furtive and gentle, just on his peripheral. It's fuzzy and unclear around the sharp edges of its teeth but it wants his attention, though he won't give it.

  
It isn't as afraid of him as he is of it and he cannot spook it off. But he can turn away and keep it just beyond the edges of his sight, just beyond the corner of his good eye where he does not have to see it. He can pretend that it is not there.

  
It is quiet, at least. But it is just being patient.

  
It trots at his heels like a loyal dog as he walks down the incline of Doc Mitchell's yard and into Goodsprings. It sits on its haunches and watches him kill hours shooting sarsaparilla bottles with Sunny Smiles, trying to work the tremors and the clumsy discomfort out of his right hand. It stands guard like a gargoyle at the foot of the ratty mattress he lays down on in the old campsite, rather than ask another favor from Mitchell.

  
It's nowhere to be found when Joe Cobb comes sauntering into town with his boys, because Ezra does what needs doing, and it's satisfied in that for a while. It leaves him be while he sits at Trudy's bar after, with a free round of whiskey as his reward; in its absence he is free to take in their company and he grits his teeth in a smile at the chatter, though the music and the voices are broken glass in the throbbing fissure of his ongoing migraine.

  
The gnawing thing remains blessedly gone when Victor carries his limp body a second time to a proper bed and lays him down to rest.

  
But it's waiting for him again by the door when he wakes clear-headed in the small hours.

 

It follows him when he leaves.

 

* * *

 

It shames Ezra, how glad he is to lose sight of Goodsprings' water tower over the ridges. They'd been kinder to him there than he could have expected or asked.

  
It's just that there was a grave that loomed over his shoulder everywhere he went in that town.

  
It had become an invasive feeling at the back of his mind, digging into his thoughts second by second and not letting him forget. It was the pressure of leering eyes on his back, of teeth on his throat.

  
He becomes aware of his heartbeat slowing somewhere south of Jean Sky Diving, though he can't recall when it had started racing. But he feels for a while like he's shaken the claws of something awful out of him, and he makes his way steadily south.

  
He feels better, just a bit, even though he finds himself drifting dizzily like a sidewinder once a mile and needing to stop to straighten his head out. The desert tips and bucks around him less and less often each day, he's found, and the nausea is replaced with hunger by tiny degrees until he can just stand to chew slowly on strips of yucca.

  
The hateful, empty "Why?" at the back of his mind propels him on, hissing at him in time with two spent casings chiming in his pocket. By the time he's past Primm he's shaken the doubt that it's within his means to answer it.

 

* * *

 

At the Mojave Outpost he tries, falteringly, to sweet talk Major Knight into smoothing the fearful goosebumps off his skin. The bandages on Ezra's face are a sight less sickening than what they protect, but if he was ever pretty to look at -- and he doesn't think he was -- he certainly isn't now. He thinks bitterly that perhaps the Major has not been lonely enough for long enough to ignore that fact.

  
The company would have scared away the thing that has followed his boot tracks all the way down, but it crawls into bed with him in the barracks instead to keep him cold through the night. The faint hum of ED-E hovering nearby is the only comfort he has.

 

* * *

 

  
  
That hungry thought, that yawning grave finally ambushes him in Nipton.

 

* * *

 

The bandana isn't enough to ward off the stench of burning rubber and human fat, but it's better than nothing, if barely. Ezra is dizzy again as he stumbles down the main avenue. Maybe it's the fumes, or it's the miles since his last meal.

  
Maybe it's just the hole in his head.

  
Both of his eyes try to widen, and the right one does fine -- but the left stabs a pain through his face, under the bandages, where stitches knit it shut in a neat and orderly row like occupied crosses studding a broken street. He lists sideways into the outer wall of a house, in the shadow of a man with just enough life left in him to cry.

  
Ezra cries too. He heaves, though there's nothing in him but water and bile. The grimace lances pain up his ruined face, and that side grows damp too, a popped suture trickling blood down his cheek.

  
"Who are you?” asks a man in a cowl of coyote’s fur. “Tell me your business here, that you walk so bravely into an open grave.” He has a humming half-laugh of a voice with an acid tang to it just sharp enough to eat its way in through the ringing in Ezra’s ears.

 

He pushes off from the wall and stumbles. Someone else catches him, not kindly. A different man than the speaker -- a man in a cloth hood who couldn't quite see over Ezra’s shoulder should he stand straight -- holds him roughly by the biceps despite the awkward difference in their stature. It is enough to keep Ezra upright.

 

It sends a renewed twist of nausea through his stomach.

 

It is not a gesture for his benefit, he knows. It reminds him too much of rope around his wrists. Without quite meeting the black goggles staring him down he mumbles a shaky “thank you” anyway, because he doesn't know what else to do.

 

The man with the dog cowl, the leader, doesn't repeat his question. He has an expectant air about him, a terrible patience that suggests he is not prone to asking twice. He waits with a faint smile while Ezra shakes.

 

His tongue is dry and sticks to the roof of his mouth but he finds his voice when ED-E tries to gently insinuate itself between Ezra and the legionnaire grunt still gripping him. “Courier.” At a gesture from their leader the soldier obliges and releases him. The eyebot presses in against his shoulder blade to keep him steady. “I'm jus' a courier.”

 

He straightens his spine but he couldn't meet the commander’s eyes even were they uncovered, so he glances jerkily at the dead coyote’s empty stare, then looks down and inspects his dusty boots instead. “I fetch,” he bites off with a tremor to break the silence. “I deliver. I go back.”

 

“I'm familiar with your kind,” the commander admits at length, and there's a private joke in there. Ezra can hear the implied chuckle, but it's not meant for him to know. “Like a loyal dog -- a favorite tool of mine, do you know?”

 

“Dogs? Or couriers?”

 

The man does chuckle then, and that is the only answer Ezra will get. He knows this.

 

“Don't worry,” the commander soothes, “I won't have you lashed to a cross like the rest of these degenerates.” Ezra’s knees threaten to buckle under the weight of that worry shifting as it's acknowledged aloud. “It's useful that you happened by, Courier.”

 

Ezra shudders, and nods minutely at his own toes.

 

“I want you to witness the fate of the town of Nipton, to memorize every detail. And then, when you move on?” The leader of the legion party shifts lazily from foot to foot, tilts his head down as though he mustn’t look up and up to see Ezra. “I want you to teach everyone you meet the lessons that Caesar’s Legion taught here, especially any NCR troops you run across.”

 

He nods automatically, one quick jerk of the chin before he catches the gesture and interrupts it with a cautious shake of the head. “I ain't--”

 

“Are you not best equipped to deliver my message?” The commander smiles thinly. He does not bare his teeth, at least not from his face. He doesn’t need to. He has Ezra by the throat within his jaws already.

 

The fires burn on and on. Oily black smoke fills his head, but he feels something in there getting sharper.

 

“What message?” He hates how it sounds like a whine. His voice cracks. “I dunno how you mean--”

 

“Where to begin? That they are weak, and we are strong?”

 

The commander speaks on about Nipton’s crimes. Ezra tries to listen like his life depends on it but something cold has its fingers on the back of his neck. Something icy is filling the spaces in him left by the thing that has been gnawing away, something is pouring into the empty vessel of him through the cracks in his skull.

 

A man pinned to a cross behind Ezra whimpers deliriously for his mother.

 

The heat of the fire splits a human bone with a small, resounding crack.

 

The smell of meat and death catches a southerly breeze coming ‘round the town hall and rides its way down to him.

 

A mongrel paces hungrily at his left in what remains of his peripheral, and so does a legionnaire at his right. He finds they look much the same.

 

“It was a town of whores--”

 

“You captured everyone?” He shouldn't interrupt, he was raised better, but the question is punched out of him by something, something battering around in his ribs to make room for itself to nest. It is so, so cold, cold as the grave, and it freezes the tremors out of his limbs.

 

“Yes, and herded them into the center of town,” the commander answers smoothly. He does not criticize the redundancy of the question, given their surroundings. He is all too pleased to describe it. “I told them their sins, the foremost being--”

 

“An’ the children?” It comes out like a warning bark. Ezra’s lips peel back from his teeth. The man only smirks at the sight of them. “Whatchu done wi' the children?”

 

The legionnaire nearest him takes a half-step closer at his impertinence. The mongrel does the same, reacting to the tension. He wonders again at how alike they look, and wonders what he looks like in turn. ED-E trills a meaningless beep beside his ear.

 

“The children?” the man asks with mocking wonder. “Children raised from birth into depravity -- do you expect they were redeemable? That wickedness suckled in infancy could be washed clean without blood?”

 

The commander favors Ezra with a wry look, with false pity. “What a decadent world you must have grown into yourself, courier hound, to have never needed learn the bitter truth of its workings. It is better,” he says slowly, like a teacher giving him time to take notes, “that they should die before the evil begat in them can fester.”

 

Ezra stares at his own reflection on the man's goggles. He looks like a rabid dog. He wants to scream.

 

He does not.

 

A cold thing twists lazily between his lungs and bares its teeth in a rictus grin out of the hole it chewed to get into him.

 

He rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck as if he is about to go to work.

 

 _“I'm gonna wear yer head like you wear that dog’s,”_ something says with Ezra’s mouth, calm as anything.

 

For a split second he can watch the man feel the chill of it grip him.

 

“Legionnaires! We have a problem!”

 

It’s quicker, he knows, than how it feels. He draws his pistol but it feels too syrupy-slow.

 

His hands are steady as Doc Mitchell’s must have been, to have pulled the bullets from him cleanly, but it takes him longer to find the front sight with one eye, the wrong eye. The commander charges in with a hungry blade and Ezra’s finger jerks the trigger on instinct before he's aimed.

 

There’s a gout of fur when the bullet clips the coyote pelt a hair off from his mark -- a hair off from ripping open the side of the man's skull.

 

ED-E’s laser is a sudden searing heat an inch from his jaw, angled down over him to bite into the legionnaire leader's armor and push the man back. It gives Ezra room to breathe, to dance away from a hound's teeth tearing into his boot.

 

He puts a bullet in the dog.

 

Turns -- just catches a glancing cut from a machete across his arm. He smashes the pistol stock against the grunt’s head once, twice, holds the barrel there the third time and pulls the trigger.

 

He grabs the machete from the ground with his left hand when the legionnaire crumples.

 

A few seconds, barely that. Then it's only a few more.

 

The thing is that he's always known how to hurt a man, how to kill him. It's easy once you start. He just never had the heart to do it, never had the hate in him to want to.

 

(Something else in him does, something sharp-toothed and cold. Did the bullets let it in from outside? Or just knock it loose?)

 

(He'll find the man what did it. Take that gun and put it in his mouth. Make him _swallow_.)

 

The other dog leaps for his throat. He puts the machete up and guts it fore to hind. A legionnaire charges and gets the same. There’s viscera on his jeans, man and dog.

 

He can't tell the difference and he doesn't care.

 

Bullets settle the last of the entourage the heartbeat before their leader tries his luck again. He's a spry man; he weaves through the red lines of ED-E’s fire to try and take a bite out of Ezra.

 

The ripper catches in the crook of the machete’s guard, its teeth gnashing at the blade, and Ezra crosses his right hand over to shoot him. It takes too long; from this position he has to twist his head around to clap his eye on the front sight again. It leaves time for the man to thrust his free hand into the fray and push the gun wide and up.

 

The bullet's wasted on God.

 

Their blades disengage and Ezra has to wind his arm back to clear his machete for another strike. The legionnaire, with the shorter ripper, doesn't. He just takes the opening, shifts his weight and stabs in, and that's fine.

 

(That's fine.)

 

Ezra takes it to the ribs gladly with a pained grunt. He feels its teeth stutter against the bones.

 

(He been chewed by worse, of late.)

 

The impact of the machete blade against the spinal column is a shock in his elbow, but something has him by the wrists and it pulls him through the other side.

 

The head rolls in a drunken wobble away from the body and still it takes a minute to register that it's over already.

 

(He weren't _done._ )

 

When it sinks in he vomits again. He drops to his knees and cries good and hard.

 

* * *

 

 

But for ED-E he's alone with the thought that followed him back from the grave. It has shades and shades to it, rows and rows of teeth that get sharper and sharper still. It bites his ribs and chews his throat and settles into his head, triumphant. Its patience paid off in the end.

 

 _Is any of it real?_ it asks him first. _Do you know?_

 

(Could be he's in the ground now. Could be he's bleeding and choking in the dark and Junebug’ll never know why daddy never come home. Could be it's all a long dream in the seconds before his heart stops.)

 

 _It’s real, it’s real. But are you?_ it asks next. _Do you know?_

 

(If the gentle boy died in that grave and a devil come up wearing his skin, would he know?)

 

 _You're real, you’re real. But were you like this all along?_ it asks last. _Do you know?_

 

(Could be the devil was in him all his life and it just come loose. Could be his father put it there.)

 

He can hear his mother saying: “Were a gentle boy once, soft as rain. But them bullets carved a mean streak in him a mile deep.”

 

(Can he ever go home?)

 

* * *

 

 

It takes him all day. He starts by picking up a spear and putting it through each of the men on crosses.

 

The dogs in the town hall snarl and growl at first but in a charnel house such as this he wonders if they can smell the blood on him or where it came from. He’s too tired to fight. He puts his chin up, stands straight and stares them down. They let him past, to gather the bodies.

 

There's one at the back that is much, much too small

 

Just the right size that the feel of her in his arms is sickeningly familiar.

 

Her head lolls against his shoulder as he carries her outside. She could be sleeping, but for the new smear of red she leaves on his chest. He puts her down gently like a thing made of glass, in a little hole he dug that's just the right size for her.

 

Somehow it seems so much bigger than the one they made for him.

 

He cuts the men down from the crosses and lays them to rest with the townsfolk. He drags the fella from the general store out, long gone from the med-x Ezra gave him, and buries him with his friends. It's long work in the heat, the sun beating down his bare back, but he digs and he hauls and it’s seldom been graves and corpses before but, mechanically, the work is familiar. ED-E hums along after him and renders what assistance it can by beeping in intervals toward his canteen, and herding him toward the shade of a trailer when he starts to swoon.

 

He rests a few hours while the sun goes down behind the cliffs. He thinks he sees movement up there, just as the sky goes dark; coyotes, he supposes, or nightstalkers, contemplating the odds of a meal.

 

He's almost done, but not quite. He rekindles a fire to light the last bit.

 

He strings them up, one by one, dangles them by the ankles above where he first saw them on the town hall steps. Their leader’s head, stripped of its doghead cowl, is grotesquely ordinary. He lays it beneath the gently swinging corpse. The cowl he rolls up and wads into his back pocket.

 

He stands back a while. He takes in his work with grim satisfaction.

 

He won't sleep tonight, he knows.

 

“C’mon buddy. Best we deliver the news and be on our way.”

 

* * *

 

He leaves another message painted on the doors of the town hall.

Another courier reads it from his place out of sight.

 

 

WALKER CAESARĪ S.P.D.

  
CAVE CANEM

**Author's Note:**

> "Walker says much health to Caesar,
> 
> Beware the Dog"
> 
> (S.P.D. is a common abbreviation of the Latin phrase _salutem plurimam dicit_ used in writing letters as a standard greeting.)
> 
> Come talk shit with me on [Tumblr](https://atomicreactor.tumblr.com)!


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